The Distillation

Last week, the acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration called medical marijuana "a joke"

during a Q&A with reporters. Now, medical marijuana patients are calling for his head, with an online petition demanding his resignation attracting nearly 10,000 signatures on change.org "What really bothers me is the notion that marijuana is also medicinal -- because it's not," Rosenberg said in a briefing to reporters. "We can have an intellectually honest debate about whether we should legalize something that is bad and dangerous, but don't call it medicine -- that is a joke. There are pieces of marijuana -- extracts or constituents or component parts -- that have great promise" medicinally, he said. "But if you talk about smoking the leaf of marijuana -- which is what people are talking about when they talk about medicinal marijuana -- it has never been shown to be safe or effective as a medicine."

From the Article:The DEA Chief called medical marijuana 'a joke'. Now patients are calling for his resignationPublished by: Washington PostOriginal Link:﻿https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/10/the-dea-chief-called-medical-marijuana-a-joke-now-patients-are-calling-for-his-resignation/Art By: U.S. Customs and Border Protection [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons10/29/2015

While it's true that peyote, like cannabis, was politically packaged as a sheep's in wolfs clothing in the late 1960's to ensure its classification in Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), reversing that original CSA classification is a more difficult task for peyote than cannabis.

The 2 principal reasons for this include: 1) Cannabis is much better known than peyote in mainstream society is far more widely used 2) The potential cannabis market is huge compared to the potential market for peyote 3) there is still a great deal of ignorance and fear that is centered on the groups of drugs characterized as "hallucinogens".

Right now, ahead of the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs, governments and international organizations are discussing the future direction of drug policy which will determine policies of countries for the next ten years.

​We are asking you to stand in solidarity with people who use drugs, their families and communities by signing the Harm Reduction Decade Declaration that calls on governments and international organizations to: Endorse and adopt harm reduction as a key principle of drug policy throughout the next decade of the global response to drug use. Redirect just a small portion of funding from ineffective punitive drug control activities into health, human rights and harm reduction responses, and deliver a global target of a 10% shift in such funding by 2020 at the upcoming UNGASS. End the criminalisation of people who use drugs and the punitive legal frameworks that fuel HIV transmission, overdose, mass incarceration and human rights violations.From the Article: Why do we need a harm reduction decade?Published by: Harm Reduction DecadeOriginal Link:http://www.harmreductiondecade.org/why-do-we-need-a-harm-reduction-decade/Art By: Franziska Bauer - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31915014

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has responded to the ‘leak’ of its briefing paper calling for the decriminalisation of drug possession for personal use.

Before considering this response, it’s important to be clear this wasn’t really a ‘leak’ in the classic sense. The document was to be presented by the UNODC at the International Harm Reduction Conference in Kuala Lumpur, and an embargoed copy had already gone to select media (the norm for such publication events). When it was then pulled at the last minute, the BBC, which had already filmed a news segment on it, decided to release it anyway. Richard Branson was filmed for the segment as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and was sufficiently annoyed when the UNODC backtracked, that he broke the story himself on his blog.

The uncharted road to legalizing marijuana could serve as a template for regulating MDMA, which these days seems feasible within the loose 15- to 30-year time span in which future festival drugs might arise.

Here’s where Jones’ “visionary” prediction might already be coming true — at least, in some European countries. She hopes that law-making and -enforcing bodies will eventually admit that people are always going to want to take drugs, so, “let’s just create something that provides that to them in a safer, less risky fashion,” she says.

ECfES

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